Posted
by
Soulskillon Tuesday December 27, 2011 @04:55PM
from the looking-out-for-number-one dept.

jrepin writes "There is a problem with proprietary, closed software, which makes Rick Falkvinge, the founder of the first Pirate Party, a bit uneasy: 'We get a serious democratic deficit when the citizens are not able to inspect if the computers running the country's administrations are actually doing what they claim to be doing, doing all that and something else invisibly on top, doing the wrong thing in the wrong way at the wrong time, or doing nothing at all. ... In the debate around the American Stop Online Piracy Act, American legislators have demonstrated a clear capability and willingness to interfere with the technical operations of American products, when doing so furthers American political interests regardless of the policy situation in the customer’s country."

Well if you deal out Microsoft, Apple And Google, you are left with not much but Linux as an alternative! I for one would love to see this happen as resources and money would have to be poured in to make Linux distributions and applications that were world class!

You're assuming for a moment that future laws will not be written to ban such activity. Possibly enforced too via hardware. Even American based root CAs may all belong under a single Government agency. There's not a single industry in which politicians won't corrupt, control, rape, and pillage all in order to maintain a seat of power. They can not and will not leave well enough alone. To do so otherwise would leave a vacuum of power open to their rivals irregardless of the validity of such a premise.

It was an implied assumption. AKA straw man argument. Nothing wrong with creating one of those so long as it's used to illuminate a much larger issue (government corruption through legislation). In no way did I say or imply that the parent post I responded was in the wrong. I was simply providing an alternate pitfall to be aware of from the generally accepted status quo.

and I thought he was nutty, but possibly right. As time goes on, more and more I am convinced he is right. My notes from his presentation -
Richard Stallman [blogspot.com] at the Yorktown High School Libre Users Group

This a mis-association a lot of FOSS advocates/enthusiasts have to deal with.
Freedom can no more morph to equal 'piracy' than it can morph to equal purple or anaconda.

I can use my freedom to 'pirate' IP, wear purple underpants or keep a snake but the fact I choose not to has nothing to do with my freedom or lack of it.
My wanting freedom has nothing to do with wanting to do certain things that large corporations have had our legal systems changed to prevent. Just because people are very against those legalised criminals does not mean that they want to steal their Imaginary Property.

That's not what the law and a large (but ignored on Slashdot) segment of society says, but you know, being antisocial in the name of YOUR personal greed is just fine. It's only bad when it's someone else's greed, perhaps their greed for compensation for work they've performed? Obviously your greed is more meaningful and deserving of being fulfilled, because hey! you were born, so you've done just about enough thankyouverymuch.

Incorrect. The term "Free Software" does not refer to YOUR freedom, it refers to the Softwares Freedom. You are not free to do what you want with it, there are rules and requirements you must follow.

The GPL forces you to allow sharing by anyone that you share it with. Further, it forces you to give the source code to anyone you share it with (at their request). It also forces you to grant any IP licenses required to legally share the code, forces you to relinquish any cryptographic keys or hardware algo

The word 'piracy' is an attempt by Big Media to frame the debate. Let's be clear: 'piracy' is unlawfully attacking a ship on the high seas; 'copyright infringement' means unlawfully copying something. In this case 'freedom' will never equate to piracy. Freedom may mean ignoring copyright infringment if it is for the greater social good (which is my understanding of Stallman's position) - in fact in the past the USA was founded on industries that bypassed patents and copyrights held by British industry (such as automated looms etc), so such as position is not without precedent and is no less moral than the fledgling US government (the 'Founding Fathers' as they seem to be idolized as today).

1. practice of a pirate; robbery or illegal violence at sea.
2. the unauthorized reproduction or use of a copyrighted book, recording, television program, patented invention, trademarked product, etc.: The record industry is beset with piracy.
3. Also called stream capture. Geol. diversion of the upper part of one stream by the headward growth of another.

Of course it is in Webster's. The terms has been repeated so often and for so long the corporations have managed to 'frame the debate' - which is my entire point.

If we are going to play the 'definition game' then why not start with Wikipedia, where 'Software Piracy' re-directs to Copyright Infringement of Software. This is because although copyright infrigement of software is 'commonly referred to as software piracy' it is *not the same thing*! (despite Big Media trying to convince you it is).

First - as Oligonicella points out, your exercise in pedantry is not only a vanity but also incorrect. Piracy is commonly used (and defined in the dictionary) to equate to copyright infringement. Words can have more than one meaning.

Second - so what?

Tell me how ignoring copyright infringement is for the greater social good. What do you pirate - sorry, copy illegally? Music? How is not paying for it part of the greater social good? Films? Ditto.

Strictly speaking industry in the United States did not engage in patent infringement because the British did not own US patents on the technology you described.

Nor were there copyright treaties in place at that time.

In fact most of the copying of British manufacturing technology came about because of the war of 1812 and the British blockades and trade restrictions that prevented manufactured goods from outside the US from entering the country during the period following the revolution. This of course requi

n00b. No one forces you to adopt the GPL. Only those enlightened souls who *actually create something* can choose to use the GPL. All the *non-creators* who want to use the stuff the creators made without giving their own users the same freedoms are the ones who whinge.

GPL is not slavery and saying it is means you have a poor grasp of it. GPL is set of copyright terms that are designed to avoid slavery/proprietary lock-in/corporate malfeasance to users. If you don't want to use/re-use GPL software then don't. The GPL creators owe you nothing so quit whinging. How about you *create* something yourself - then we'll see what the copyright infringers and software stealers (China is bad for this) make with your stuff.

No, he's absolutely right. The GPL restricts freedom, and that's bad. It's just like how all these stupid laws restrict my freedom to do what I want, such as to run around and rape and murder people. It's terrible that if I decide I want to murder someone, that agents of the state can arrest me and force me to stay in a concrete cell; this is a serious abridgment of my freedom! No one should be allowed to touch me if I decide I want to put a bullet in someone's head, or have my way with some woman. Sim

You must only use the GPL not the MIT, BSD, Apache, University of Illinois, etc... licenses.

You can choose whatever license you want if you write the software from scratch.

But if you decide to take GPL software to make your project, then you have release your project under the same license. Those were the conditions you accepted when you took SOMEONE ELSES CODE and used it in your project.

If you don't like those conditions, don't incorporate code that belongs to those people into your project.

BSD fans are the libertarians of the software world. They want full freedom in theory even if it means serfdom in practice, rather than a system which is less free in theory but delivers more freedom in practice.

FreeBSD, (and other BSDs), FreeDOS, Darwin, Haiku, Plan 9, Solaris just to name a few. FreeBSD in particular is quite competitive with Linux, since many of the same GUI elements and applications will run on both.

Yes I'm sure Haiku will come up first on their list of OSes that people actually give a shit about. They'll probably implement the backend in Haiku, the frontend on Plan 9, and the supporting software on Solaris so that every one of you chucklefucks can jack off about the fact that someone actually uses your OS.

You do realize that people DO use some of these already? And while OS/2 isn't free, it is still be used years after it was "obsolete". It runs our PBX, and still some ATMs. Dell ships systems with FreeDOS as OEM software if you like. (I've used it, a little different but good.). Solaris, well, if you don't know Solaris, I can see why you didn't log in to post, although OpenIndiana is a better fork to use. Open or closed, lots of iron still runs Solaris.

FreeBSD in particular is quite competitive with Linux, since many of the same GUI elements and applications will run on both.

Not quite true.

For a very narrowly defined subset of hardware, FreeBSD is quite competitive with Linux assuming you're using DragonFly and not FreeBSD due to the erratic and insecure nature of ports maintenance.

FreeBSD lacks the accessibility and support that Linux does. By "support" I not only mean community support and end-user documentation (or kernel architecture documentation which is correct/consistent/current, for that matter), but hardware support, which is spotty on quality even when the hardware is "supported". ("That's the vendor's responsibility", someone will say. Since when has that been fully accurate? Even MS has taken great efforts to make sure that there are good drivers for Windows.)

Never mind that most applications which work on FreeBSD do so through a Linux compatibility layer which is kludged together, at best, and a maintenance and security nightmare at worst.

Unfortunately, not even that - The recent debacle with Canonical/Ubuntu needing to pull the Oracle/Sun JVM pretty much demonstrates that we can't even trust FOSS, without completely disabling any form of updates whatsoever.

That said, at least with open source, you have a chance of identifying and disabling the myriad ways a system tries to update itself. Good luck getting anything proprietary to stop phoning home, short of never connecting it to the internet (in which case it may just petulantly refuse to work, a la the annoying DRM in many games).

That was FUD. Oracle is moving Java from the Java6 sdk to the openjdk, and this Ubuntu upgrade move you from sun java to open jdk... If you can live without update, don't do the upgrade. Upgrade Manager even tells you what it is doing.

The wife is doing fine on a three year old installation. Updating Firefox broke Pogo - or updating Java broke Pogo. One or the other. So, she nagged at me for three days to DOWNGRADE Firefox and Java, and there have been no updates on her machine since. If it breaks Pogo, it's bad, bad, BAD!

Well, that's one of the nice things about Linux in general. Security through obscurity! How many times have we been told, right here on slashdot, that no one even wants to hack into a Linux machine?

And, those known security holes on on HER machine, not mine. uname tells me that I'm not on Ubuntu at all: Linux sabayon 3.1.0-sabayon Since her machine has nothing of commercial or financial interest on it, I'm not about to fight with her about updating! At most, a hacker would get some personal details,

That was FUD. Oracle is moving Java from the Java6 sdk to the openjdk, and this Ubuntu upgrade move you from sun java to open jdk.

Yes and no... Given the more-or-less equivalence of the two JDKs, it means a minor nuisance for most people as they search the forums to figure out why Random App X inexplicably broke, and how to point their favorite toys at Open instead of Sun. Should they ever have needed to do so?

Upgrade Manager even tells you what it is doing.

To most people, an official "update" amounts to a calm reassurance that some geek-deities somewhere far away, perhaps Silicon Valley, perhaps Finland, perhaps Mars for all they know, have cast a spell that will make everything work out alright. Even among lower-tier tech-savvy people, very few would know whether or not they wanted to let the updater make the indicated change. Hell, even as a seasoned developer, I wouldn't necessarily know (prior to the change) what, if anything, would break as a result.

I don't disagree with you in spirit, but the issue still boils down to having changes made semi-unwittingly to your system, for political rather than technical reasons. Not because it will give you the best long-term outcome, but because an agreement has expired between parties you don't even recognize as even remotely relevant to the state of "your" PC.

And that I take as the heart of the FP's argument - We can't trust proprietary software because we can't know when a distribution agreement may retroactively expire, or a court may waves their wand-o'-justice to make P2P magically illegal overnight, or some government wants to censor any mention of Pastafarianism. None of those, except by my decision to play ball, should have any effect whatsoever on my PC that worked just fine the day before.

I would rather have an eternity of software freedom at hand. The Linux kernel is obviously robust, portable, capable, scalable, and proven. But in some distributions Linux is not entirely free because Linus Torvalds' fork contains non-free binary-only software (see the linux-libre project for a fully free Linux kernel). Also I'd hope for software freedom and not a particular approach (this OS, that kernel, etc.) because there are other free software programs that shouldn't be forgotten just because they'

I find this sort of thing rather amusing. You didn't trust closed source software...

So you download ten million or so lines of source code from some anonymous server, written by thousands of people you've never met and will never know. You then build it using even more software and libraries and tools running under yet another OS, and you then install it on hardware with its own BIOS and roms and controllers.

Hundreds of millions of lines of code you've never seen, and never will see...

1. How much of Linux have you audited? Go ahead, give me the LOC count...I'll wait.

2. See 1.

3. If they're qualified to, then yes, they can. If they do the audit. See 1.

4. All the laws? Never. Some of the major laws that I know will affect me? Yep. And I've had the conversations with a police officer to make me grateful that I did. Mind you, I also read mortgages, fully, and ask if I don't understand something.

Okay, back to #1. What's the answer? If it's greater than zero, then how did you audit it? What's y

I find this sort of thing rather amusing. You didn't trust closed source software...

So you download ten million or so lines of source code from some anonymous server, written by thousands of people you've never met and will never know. You then build it using even more software and libraries and tools running under yet another OS, and you then install it on hardware with its own BIOS and roms and controllers.

As opposed to purchasing software made up of millions of lines of codes, bits and pieces of which were outsourced to who knows where and full of pre compiled secret sauce binaries and a giant tangle of interdependent licensing agreements?

The way I see it, Its all about risk management.

Most companies don't have a problem with using off the shelf generic software - mainly because they can swap it out without seriously impacting their business.

I wonder how long it would take to discover some subtle malware/spyware/backdoor/... that was put into the RedHat codebase - on orders of the US Govt ?
Who independently audits all of the source code and then rebuilds and compares the binaries using a known clean tool chain ?
I doubt that anyone does it.

CentOS and Scientific Linux recompile the RedHat source code, but I doubt that they audit at the code + RedHat patches for clever ''tweaks''. They don't have the resources to do so.

"No one in their right mind would put malicious code into something where anyone can find it, and if they did, it wouldn't last long in the wild."

Assumptions. You assume that the code is somehow tagged with malicious comments, perhaps?

If I were a government, and I REALLY wanted to hack into systems, I'd have some people join a few OSS projects and have them inject my code into the system. A specific unchecked buffer here or there would probably go unnoticed up to and until the point where it was needed.

No it was not, but that's not the point. Congress can order technology to restrict freedoms outside America. That was only theoretically the case before SOPA and similar bills. Now, there is no reason to assume that the American government is not interfering with any technology you can't inspect yourself.

Or to remove the double negatives: Now there is reason to assume the American government is interfering with any technology you can't inspect yourself.

Unless the folks who made the software on the router are in cahoots with each other, or a third party. With all the secrecy behind "National Security" these days, I wouldn't put it past the government to try something like ensuring a router manufacturer designs a router to ignore attempts to log certain "phone home" data.

Not that I'm saying they're doing that, but that I could see them doing that. I'd be very surprised if nobody in the government has at least considered it.

Re "If it's phoning home, we can detect it."
The problem is not so much what is "phoning home" everyday but the carrieriq like layer between any shipped phone in parts of the world wrt https and all input.
From 2006 "FBI taps cell phone mic as eavesdropping tool" http://news.cnet.com/2100-1029-6140191.html [cnet.com]
Before that you had the fun of the safe 56 bits and the Data Encryption Standard.
More at http://cryptome.org/nsa-v-all.htm [cryptome.org]
Products have shipped for generations before smart people began to discover what they had really installed and recommended beyond the accepted public math and low price.

I assume that you are talking about conventional software you buy and install on your desktop/laptop/tablet/phone. But what about cloud-based services (Salesforce, Google, iTunes, etc.)? They are exposing an interface and set of functions but the rest of it is not transparent.
This class of software is probably where we should focus anti-SOPA efforts...

On one hand Slashdotters are yelling about how untrustable corporate software is, an on the other had they are yelling about how much they want the ability to hook up their personal laptops, smartphones, tablets, etc. to the corporate networks when they go to work. WTF!? Come on guys, give your fucking heads a collective shake. What's it to be then, the corporate software is safe enough to expose your personal devices or it's... what?

This is why I never could fucking understand this "I want to use my own

One of the major arguments for SOPA have been the trillions of dollars of theoretical losses of sales by the Media companies. As has been pointed out repeatedly ad nauseum, these losses are only theoretical.

But has someone on the senate actually done some estimation of possible loss of revenue, if the internet actually becomes splintered and USA loses its control? Or of even more foreign governments just turning to open source solutions, instead of to, say Microsoft? China, for example, is a big competitor already for the control of internet. They control a sizable part of it already. Let us say that they actually get it in their head to actually set up an alternate mechanism and act as the controlling authority? Even USA doesn't really dares to stand up to them... so all in all, we are talking of China ultimately controlling the distribution of said media/softwares, and who knows what terms they will set for the USA based companies?

I will admit that chances of above happening are remote at the moment. But what are these media folks, and their employees in the senate, smoking? Why even take the chance?

We all know that SOPA is all about the money (I'll ignore the "everything is" argument, for now). Money the *IAAs feel they are losing, money the politicians have accepted in campaign contributions... Even the advertisements trying to drum up support for SOPA are about all the jobs (money) that will be lost if this doesn't become law...

Every argument I've heard has been about ideals and technology... We all know how politicians and corporations feel about ideals. Freedom of speech, Impossible to implement, Would break the very foundation of the web, etc... All meaningless to these people without a dollar sign attached to them.

This is the first argument I have heard that directly turns the tables. "Pass SOPA, and we will no longer trust any software produced by a US company." This would affect many more than just MS, Apple, and Google... How many PCs will Dell, (or HP, or Acer, or...) sell outside of the US if they are not allowed to sell them with (or without) Windows? If Dell et. al. are forced into producing computers with Windows installed for the US market, and %NotWindows% for the rest of the world, how long before they decide it isn't worth the effort, and just pick their favorite %NotWindows% for the entire line? How many jobs will be lost if no one in Europe is allowed to use Photoshop, MS Office, iTunes, AutoCAD,... The list goes on and on.

Do I think this is likely to happen? Not really.. But it makes for a good advertising campaign against SOPA.

I read the article, and I can't figure out what he's talking about. Can anyone make sense of the article? Is he talking about some aspect of SOPA (stop online piracy act) that I am not aware of? The aspects of SOPA that I'm familiar with is the fact that the US will be able to disconnect domains based on reports of piracy on websites. Here's some examples of what I'm talking about:

"[US] policymakers are not the slightest afraid of legislatively ordering American-run corporations to sabotage their customers in order to further United States foreign policy... Worded differently, the American legislature has taken itself the right to sabotage American products, boobytrapping them to enforce American laws and economic interests outside of its borders by directly sabotaging the administration of other countries."

In what way does SOPA order American-run corporations to sabotage their customers to further American policy? It sounds to me like he's arguing that the US government is forcing Microsoft and Google to harm their customers - perhaps through destroying foreign documents or secretly sending state-secrets to the United States government. Is this some part of SOPA that I'm not aware of?

Or this:

In the debate around the American Stop Online Piracy Act, American legislators have demonstrated a clear capability and willingness to interfere with the technical operations of American products, when doing so furthers American political interests regardless of the policy situation in the customer’s country.

In what way does SOPA interfere with the technical operations of American products?

These quotes reflect pretty much the tone of the entire article, and I can't figure out what he's talking about. Earlier he talks about how everyone runs software from Microsoft or Apple. In what way does "taking websites off the internet" interfere with the "technical operations of American products [such as the construction of software by Microsoft and Apple]"?

Quite frankly, when I read the article, I'm completely confused by what he's alleging is going on. It's all very vague and conspiratorial. I can't figure out if Falkvinge wrote the article half asleep, whether he's going off the deep end and falling prey to strange conspiracy theories, or if there's some aspect of SOPA that nobody's talked about (which seems unlikely, given the amount of press I've seen about SOPA).

I am referring to the fact that the SOPA debate has shown that US legislators won't hesitate for a moment to mutilate global technical resources if they can be used as leverage to project US trade interests, intensely disregarding the fact that severeign nations elsewhere have other sets of laws.

Specifically, the seizure of Internet domains is a precursory example.

Since the legislators have shown both a willingness and a capacity to regard anything happening on US soil as something that can b

I am referring to the fact that the SOPA debate has shown that US legislators won't hesitate for a moment to mutilate global technical resources if they can be used as leverage to project US trade interests, intensely disregarding the fact that severeign nations elsewhere have other sets of laws.

Let's dispense with the argument that this is US legislators fighting for "US trade interests". This is about particular US companies pushing US legislators to fight back against a stubborn foe: global piracy. (Also, by framing it as "US trade interests" you're intentionally suggest a wider attack on foreign trade. If you set it up more accurately, it would be "unfair competition" because piracy is an illegitimate form of trade competition. Of course, if you talk about piracy as a form of unfair competition, you can't scare people because if you said "the US legislators won't hesitate to fight unfair competition" you'd lose the moral highground.)

The US is able to unilaterally cut websites (both foreign and domestic) off the internet because they are doing something that many people find wrong, but other countries have semi-legalized. But, wait, what did you write in the article again: "[US] policymakers are not the slightest afraid of legislatively ordering American-run corporations to sabotage their customers in order to further United States foreign policy". What in the world does kicking websites off the internet have to do with forcing US corporations to sabotage their customers? What are you alleging here? Where is the sabotage? How does this "advance US foreign policy"? It sounds to me like SOPA is US corporations telling the US government what to do, and you're here telling us that the US government is telling the US corporations what to do. So which is it? Who is telling who what to do because it seems to me that SOPA is doing the exact opposite of what you're claiming in your article. I can see absolutely nothing to support your claims of "sabotage" in order to "advance US foreign policy". Since you brought up Apple and Microsoft specifically, could you please explain how and why these companies are going to sabotage you at the behest of the US government, why no US company can be trusted, and what this has to do with SOPA?

Specifically, the seizure of Internet domains is a precursory example.

A precursory example? You mean that nothing in SOPA supports your claims, but you fully expect that sometime in the future things will start happening differently to support your view of the world?

Since the legislators have shown both a willingness and a capacity to regard anything happening on US soil as something that can be legislated into political leverage, at the expense of the customers and the US supplier

First, define "political leverage" because I can't figure out how it makes sense in this context.
Second, how is "kicking piracy websites off the internet" creating political leverage at the expense of the customers and US supplier?

we must assume that cloud services and closed software can and will also be thus regarded.

What in the world are you talking about? What, specifically are you alleging? Are you saying that the US government passing SOPA at the behest of corporations indicates that the US government is going to force corporations to... what? Steal your state secrets? That's quite a stretch from "US corporations want the US government to pass laws to allow a crackdown on piracy websites" into a complete reversal "the US government is dictating to US corporations to sabotage customers and steal information from foreign nations".

This, in turn, means that any nation serious about its sovereignty can't let its critical administrative processes b

Let me see... I have a site that does not violate any of the laws of *my* country... but a company in USA can just cook up a case and get it shut down regardless, in an instant.And all this because, the internet is controlled by USA. So does this law passes out of any US national security concerns? Does it take into account of juridictions etc? Nope. This is done at behest of some corporate suits, who want to buy yet another island somewhere.

The logical response to this is for foreign countries to blackhole US sites after SOPA passes. Because it's the slap in the face my politicians need, especially jackasses like Smith, Conyers, Berman, Goodlatte, Waters and especially Watt.

Watt, the asshole who actually argued from ignorance and used ignorance as a reason to vote for SOPA.

SOPA will pass because the technophobes of the House of Representatives fully outnumber reps like Polis by an order of magnitude.

My question was not "What's bad about SOPA?" or "What if US corporations can buy laws in the US?" My question is: "How does the SOPA situation (where corporations are pushing for US laws) allow anyone to conclude that software created by US companies is evil, will sabotage you, and under the complete control of the US government?"

Because if US companies are the ones writing USA laws, in total disregard for jurisdictions or possibility of abuse, etc. then it is entirely feasible that they can eventually move this up a notch and get a kill-switch enabled in say microsoft windows, MS Office. Oracle databases, whathaveyou and simply put the Competitor's entire network/infra-structure out of commission. "Pay up or we disable that oracle database, the moment it connects to internet for updates, license be damned".Internet, like say managi

Today's global economic situation is not much different than that of 1932. After years if not decades of reckless investment, currency and market manipulation, leveraged investment, and rapacious profit-making, US corporations and banks conspired in a way that ultimately led to a economic meltdown.

In 1929 they didn't need computers and software to do this. They needed a willing and complicit Legislature, courts, and government agencies. The results then are well known, as they are today.

We started back down this path in 1999 with the repeal of the Glass-Steagell Act. Couple that with the continuous pressure to expand home ownership, a Federal Reserve inappropriately tasked with controlling inflation and economic growth, and lack of oversight into multiple industries (Accounting firms audting a corporation while their banking divisions floated the IPO, for instance) and you had the makings of a perfect storm. It came.

Corporations, by design, cannot be 'trusted' to act in the 'public interest'. They need to be at least minimally regulated, if for no other reason than to prevent the most egregious abuses.

What this has to do with software is beyond me. It's more than that, a lot more.

If your law makers are already this insane and so blatantly for sale, who is to say that they may not pass a law enabling a built-in kill-switch for say whatever proprietary OS or telecommunications solution is being used heavily in some other country, just so that they can enforce their latest extortion scheme?

Any country with slightest amount of sense will dump US based proprietary software products immediately, and move to open-source to escape this.

"In the debate around the American Stop Online Piracy Act, American legislators have demonstrated a clear capability and willingness to interfere with the technical operations of American products, when doing so furthers American political interests regardless of the policy situation in the customer’s country."

Not quite. Should read:
"In the debate around the American Stop Online Piracy Act, American legislators have demonstrated a clear capability and willingness to interfere with the technical op

If you really want to get paranoid, you won't be using computers at all. You can't trust the software, even open source unless you've personally reviewed it all including the compiler. Even then you can't trust it unless you've reviewed the OS, BIOS and verified the design of all hardware in your system (including input devices down to the chip level.) Even then, you'll need monitor every byte of traffic on your network link (since even open software has vulnerabilities you likely didn't find in your review.) Still safe? No, because there could be listening and/or other devices anywhere, even inside the concrete blocks that make up your house. (e.g. a filter outside the street that modifies your network traffic.) Heck, even if you are Microsoft you can't trust your OWN software because there are too many cooks in the kitchen, as it were. None of whom were fully vetted.

Basically, guaranteed trust is a myth. You have to trust some one and some things or you are basically useless to society and will die of starvation (trust your food and water?) This article is either the start of a scare tactic against US companies and/or a poor attempt at bringing some rational thought to congress. Even if the US isn't doing crazy things behind the scenes, I'm sure China and most other large countries are.

Makes you think of open source and how few abuses it has been applied to. Is it immune to abuse? Probably not but it seems that it's pretty hard to hide abuses in and generally does things that are good in the short term and great in the long term!

Is it underfunded? Of course, it challenges the power elite who are terrified of an efficient transparent economy more than any act of war or violence.

Is is tampered with? Surely. But on the whole it just keeps getting better and better!

I have no such expectations of privacy at work. My duties are monitored and evaluated. If I make use of 'my' workstation for personal purposes, I am actually using the company's workstation.

I can't access web based or personal email at work - primarily to complicate transferring data to non-company storage. I can't access Facebook, Linkedin, and a host of other social systems. I can't access a multitude of sites that are either known to provide information about compromising systems, or are known to host malware of any sort. I cannot use several commenting and interaction systems such as Disqus.

Antivirus software is the least of the security measures on 'my' workstation. The corporate LAN, both wired and wireless, require certificates for me to connect. DLP processes on 'my' workstation track every read and write. Specific filters look for characteristic types of data, and prevent its transmission in emails and instant messages. Documents of al types, even text, are required to be categorized by the nature of their confidentiality, and are blocked from being stored on certain storage if they require more security than is afforded by that media.

Email can be encrypted by a method that requires the recipient to register at the corporate website to read and interact with it. Certain data cannot even be sent encrypted without specific certificates that are given only to employees for whom this is a required function.

Mind you, I have the privilege of using removable media. Not many employees do, or need to. I need to share data with non-corporate entities regularly. I assume my activities are scrutinized.

And yes, I post to Slashdot from work. Not now, but that's one reason why I share a little more info.

In the largest, most vulnerable corporations, the stakes are much higher than most people imagine. And the largest corporations are the most vulnerable.

And ultimately, everything here and in similar forums on the Internet is cataloged, analyzed, and processed. By several entities, here and abroad. It's not like Slashdot is a secret. Pretty much everything without an HTTPS in front of it is no secret, and some of the HTTPS stuff is also.

Then explain the KDELook bug Pug, which was there for over a year unnoticed? or the Quake bug? your logic fails as you automatically assume that because someone CAN do something that means it DOES get done, which just the two above bugs proves is total horseshit. And reverse engineering for security research is quite legal friend, don't know where you got your info but all the major AV firms do that 5 days a week and nobody says squat. Hell it was Russinovich at MSFT Research that came up with the info on t

I have been pondering for a long while on whether America is a Fatherland or an Motherland but you certainly make justice with your case in that it is a Homeland. All this Homeland "this" and Homeland "that." I think it's safe to say, we are at home, when we are in America.

The difference is the ideas. The idea of America is being lost. What is leftover when that is gone is just another place. May as well be called just Homeland. The ideas that are traditionally associated with America are not espoused by those that use the term Homeland.

I have been pondering for a long while on whether America is a Fatherland or an Motherland...

You insensitive clod! America is and must be a Parent-Land, utterly free of sexist gender-laden stereotypes.
Oh, wait, that "Parent-Land" term might be construed as ageist or anti-youth. Uh, America is and must be an Infantile Parent-Land! Now that's more like it.

Hate Week? TFS and TFA are about American corporate software. I thought it was Hate Century. And, I got an early start in the last century!

What surprises me is that people do actually "trust" the software on their machines. Not that I have any use for kiddy diddlers, but we've read a number of stories of diddlers deleting shit off their machines, just to have Windows serve the "deleted" data up to law enforcement. If that happens to diddlers, it happens the same way to anyone else who might want to hid

Which is why we still have more manufacturing capability than any [wikipedia.org] other country in the world, including China? Granted those stats are a bit old, it's still true. The number of jobs is down (by a lot), because US manufacturing has grown more efficient, which creates the impression that we lack manufacturing capability. Well, that and all the "Made in China" crap you find at Walmart. The reality is the US makes ~18% of the worlds manufactured stuff. And that is considered a "small fraction" of the US's economy. In an international context, the US is massive. Still by far the biggest player.

Also, the US probably should ban Chinese electronics in defense applications, but they don't.

The loss of manufacturing jobs is following the same pattern as the loss of farming jobs. Scale of automation is eliminating the jobs that require only machines to do them. Right now only 8% of the US population is engaged in making things. The productivity of this 8% is staggering of course. Capitalism at it's best.

China is hampered by its cheap labor - it is far less attractive to automate when wages are terribly low. However as Chinese wages increase it will be increasingly attractive to automate, and of